


Under Your Guard

by Valeriian



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: /rises from the ashes of my 5-year long fic hiatus with coffee and a game I've never actually played, Anal Fingering, Cullen/Dorian - Freeform, Dragon Age: Inquisition - Freeform, Fluff and Smut, Kissing, M/M, Trans Male Character, and also i make the rules, and yes that's a euphemism, because there aren't enough trans tops in fic, cullen is trans and also he tops, male terminology for afab anatomy, pwp - now with feelings!, strap-on sex, swordplay-cum-flirting, trans author
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-11-09 11:53:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20852993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valeriian/pseuds/Valeriian
Summary: Dorian makes a face like Cullen has just force-fed him something sour. “When I agreed to this wager,’” he says, moustache twitching, “I assumed the result would be something pleasant.”Cullen shrugs. “Shouldn’t have lost on purpose, then.”





	Under Your Guard

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes, when you give your friend a bunch of prompts, one of them jumps off the page and slaps you hard enough to revive your fic writing career. 
> 
> Unbeta'ed and I'm rusty, so be gentle!

* * *

“Ready for round two?” Cullen asks, flushed and out of breath, sweat beading at his temples. 

“I most certainly am not,” Dorian answers primly, eyes narrowed. “One was too many.” 

Cullen grins in the face of the arching tone, pleased with himself at the double entendre even if Dorian seems to stubbornly ignore it’s presence. He swings his sword around with a loose circle of his wrist. “Come now-- I thought you said ‘the honorable Dorian Pavus never goes back on his word’. Was that right?” 

Dorian makes a face like Cullen has just force-fed him something sour. “When I  _ agreed _ to the wager,’” he says, moustache twitching, “I assumed the result would be something  _ pleasant. _ ”

Cullen shrugs. “Shouldn’t have lost on purpose, then.” 

Dorian’s mouth twitches downwards again. “Yes, I suppose I shouldn’t have.” He sighs, dramatic and put-upon, but raises the wooden practice sword to mirror Cullen’s stance. “I anyone would pick something as  _ inane _ as teaching a mage swordplay, it would be you.”

“You’re just cross you didn’t have it mastered the moment you gripped the handle.” 

“I’m  _ cross _ because this is  _ ridiculous.  _ I’m a mage, perfectly capable of keeping myself alive without this particular brand of  _ barbaracy.” _

“Perhaps,” Cullen counters, arguing the same point he’s argued since they’d begun. “But if your reserves fail, or you come up against a tenacious templar?”

Dorian comes at him then. It’s unexpected, but clumsy, and Cullen parries his inelegant thrust with an easy flick of the wrist, stepping through the opening he’s created. He taps Dorian’s shoulder lightly with the flat. “Another for me,” he says. Dorian makes a frustrated noise. Cullen ignores it. “Your feet are wrong, again.” 

“Yes there’s a good deal wrong with me, evidently.” Dorian snipes. 

“Don’t be petulant.” 

Cullan relaxes, tucking the sword into his belt before he steps around Dorian and puts a hand on each of his shoulders. He squares them, pulling Dorian upward to stand fully straight, and then trails his hands down so they rest on the bones of Dorian’s hips. He squares those, too, and feels Dorian go malleable under his palms despite all his earlier reticence. 

“Bend your knees,” Cullen says lowly into the crook of Dorian’s neck. “Keep your feet at shoulders’ width. Remember; you live on the balls of the feet, not the heel. You’ll move quicker, that way.” He hears Dorian sigh, feels him rolls his eyes with his entire body, but Dorian follows instruction--  _ almost _ perfectly. 

He’s trying, Cullen knows. Not even a skill he had no interest in whatsoever could overcome Dorian’s need to perform it to the absolute best-- on the first try, if he could help it. Cullen remembers his own first, the worn-smooth leather of the practice sword’s grip, made slick by his sweaty, uncalloused fingers. He’s had nearly twenty years to master it, now. Dorian has had all of twenty minutes, and is already impatient. Not exactly the mark of a promising swordsman, but Cullen can’t say he wasn’t ever the same, himself. 

He slides his foot between Dorian’s legs, nudges his foot a few more inches apart. “Wider,” he says. Dorian’s shoulders go tense and then lax again, and when he speaks his voice has a hint of laughter in it: “This  _ is _ more what I had in mind,” 

“I’m sure.” Cullen says, flatly. That the situation is not at all dissimilar to others they’ve shared, Dorian bent forward over Cullen’s desk and Cullen brusque and demanding behind, is not lost on him. Were Dorian not so insistent they leave the swordplay behind Cullen might have been swayed.

He circles back around to Dorian’s front, again, and takes up his stance. Dorian mimics him when he raises the wooden stick, and Cullen holds there for a moment and rakes a quick, assessing gaze down his form. “What did I say about watching my sword?” he asks. 

Dorian’s mouth sets firmer. “Not to.” 

“Good.” Cullen smiles, flexing his fingers. Shifting his weight. He takes a step to the side, one foot crossing over the other, and when Dorian mirrors that, too, he feels a swell of pride in his chest. Damn the man, Cullen thinks without true malice, he really  _ was _ infuriatingly intuitive at everything. “Watch my eyes,” he finds himself explaining further, though Dorian is doing exactly that. “Rely on your peripherals to counter my strikes.” 

To illuminate his point Cullen chooses that moment to surge forward, driving the thrust at a fraction of his battlefield speed, yet faster than he has advanced since they’d begun. Dorian counters sluggishly, though there’s promise in the movement of his wrist and the way he sinks down lower into his knees to absorb the blow. “Yes!” Cullen finds himself saying, unabashedly proud, and Dorian blinks in surprise before he grins, too-- less guileless, more cat-like. Cullen comes at him again, striking from the other side as he maneuvers Dorian in a circle, looking to test his feet, and Dorian manages to cross them over one another without tripping, reacting to each of Cullen’s steps with one of his own while avoiding the occasional offensive jab of wood. 

Once he has Dorian about-faced, Cullen moves him backward. This Dorian reacts less well to, stumbling in the face of Cullen’s advance, but he recovers quickly, the set of his mouth deepening as he raises his arm to halt each of Cullen’s assured downward strokes until stubborn tenacity gives way to honed skill. Dorian steps too heavily, crossing over himself with an arm swung wide and Cullen lodges his sword’s guard under Dorian’s and batters it away with a sharp jerk of his wrist. The wood clatters loudly against the floorboards. Cullen takes another confident step forward, pinning Dorian against the far wall, and flicks the point of his own sword to Dorian’s throat. 

“Yield.” Cullen says, unable to help the smirk on his face. Dorian’s expression changes rapidly, from outright shock to peevishness. “Yes,  _ alright, _ ” he grouses, “I yield. Madman.” 

Cullen lowers the sword. Dorian steps away from the wall, nursing his wrist. Cullen knows he can’t have hurt him, but there’s a hint of danger in Dorian’s expression that tells him something else is brewing, deeper than the smarting. 

“I haven’t hurt you, have I?” Cullen asks anyway, just to be sure, keeping his tone even as he bends to retrieve Dorian’s sword from the floor. He lays both on his desk, atop the various paperwork littering it. When no answer is forthcoming, he asks again. “Dorian?” 

“No,” Dorian says finally, tightly, with an exhale that makes his whole body sag. The thrill of his triumph fading, Cullen coaxes various papers into absent-minded stacks. He wonders if he’s pushed too far. It would certainly not be the first time; Dorian’s moods were mercurial, hard to predict and easily soured. Cullen imagines that letting Dorian best him might have been the correct path to take-- or at least he should have not been so eager. “Dorian,” he begins, voice quiet, “I’m sorry--”

“No,” Dorian says again, harder, cutting Cullen off. “No, I’m being foolish. You’ve done nothing wrong, Amatus. The only thing injured is my pride.” 

He crosses the circular room, coming to stop before Cullen, and bends, catching Cullen’s face between his elegant hands and pressing a soft kiss to his lips. A tremor runs through Cullen, as it does most times Dorian kisses him. His hand goes to Dorian’s hip. 

“I suppose,” Dorian says, pulling away and frowning, though the frown seems directed inward. “That I am unused to being…  _ outperformed.” _

_ Ah,  _ thinks Cullen,  _ so I am right.  _ He does not say this, however, and schools his expression into something that he hopes Dorian will not misconstrue as gloating, or anything of a similar sort. “That is hardly a failing,” is what he  _ does  _ say, rubbing his thumb in a small circle against the bone under Dorian’s tunic. “I’ve had more time to practice.” 

“Do you really worry for me, Amatus?”

Dorian asks it with a strange timbre in his voice, something incredulous and yet distantly vulnerable. Cullen thinks of the times where he has watched Dorian’s back as it departed from him, alongside friends and trusted warriors but pointedly  _ without _ Cullen himself. He knows it is foolish, that Dorian is an accomplished mage--perhaps  _ the _ most accomplished, depending on who Cullen asked-- and that even deprived of his magic Dorian still possessed a wealth of knowledge, tenacity and wit in its place. And yet. 

“I do,” Cullen says, with a heavy exhale of his own. “Each time you leave my sight, I worry. Call it senseless, call it patronizing, but I do. Allow a foolish old man that.” 

Dorian crooks a finger under Cullen’s chin, tilting it upward. “A sweet, sentimental man, more like,” he says, softly. 

Cullen chuckles, depreciatory. “Yes, well. We are both stubborn, in our own ways.”

“Indeed,” Dorian says, and kisses him again. 

When they part, Cullen is greeted with familiar slyness. “Am I correct in assuming the lesson is over?” Dorian asks. 

Cullen rolls his eyes good-naturedly. “Did you have another pastime in mind?” 

“As a matter of fact, I did,” Dorian says, visibly pleased. He steps forward until the back of Cullen’s legs hit the desk, and picks at the laces of his shirt. “When the subject of the bet was the opportunity to learn new techniques, I had rather hoped you were going to use a different sword.” 

“Naturally.” 

And really, Cullen had been expecting the sentence all evening. He leans back heavily against the desk as Dorian unlaces his tunic, and when Dorian opens his mouth to reply Cullen seizes him by the back of the neck, pulling him down to slot their mouths together, and feels the words die on Dorian’s lips. He hums contentedly, tightening his grip on the short hairs of Dorian’s nape until he feels Dorian gasp into his mouth. Cullen winds his hand around Dorian’s waist, dipping it lower once it reaches the back to cup the swell of his ass unhurriedly and parts his lips further, sliding his tongue in to tangle with Dorian’s. He gets a small mewl for his trouble, Dorian going pliant under his hands. When Cullen pulls back he is pleased to see Dorian’s eyes beginning to glaze. He jerks his head to the side, not breaking eye contact. “Get it,” Cullen says evenly, proud of how unaffected he sounds despite the heat growing between them. Dorian grins and disengages. Cullen lets him go. He unlaces his breeches unhurriedly, and pulls his tunic up and over his head as he watches Dorian circle the heavy desk and bend behind it, retrieving a leather-bound box of dark wood. 

When Dorian returns his breathing is heavier. Cullen kisses him again, then reaches inside. 

Smoothly-ribbed glass is cool against his fingertips, and the shaft reflects the light of the candles as Cullen draws the elegant phallus out of its chest and unwinds the harness from around it. Balancing himself against the desk, Cullen steps into the leg loops and tugs on the trailing straps to tighten them down. When he’s finished, and the plackets of his breeches are tucked out of the way, he grips the cock down at the base and pushes it against his own, adjusting it’s position. Dorian’s smile is catlike as he crowds Cullen’s space, now fully nude to counter Cullen’s half. He wraps his fingers around the shaft on top of Cullen’s. Cullen sucks in air through his teeth. 

“I always forget how big you are,” Dorian purrs. It might have embarrassed Cullen once, before he’d learned Dorian and how he played coy with certain things and wildly not, with others.

“It’s fortunate your ass does not,” Cullen replies, bold, and feels a surge of self-satisfaction when Dorian’s eyes, for a split second, open wider in surprise. Cullen has been working on his bedroom talk. He only blushes a little. 

Dorian recovers quickly. “Your mouth, Commander,” he says, with a soft laugh, “how terribly filthy,” and Cullen says “Quite,” as he’s lead perfunctorily to the desk by his dick. There’s a small shuffling once they arrive-- Dorian brushes the haphazardly stacked papers away, and Cullen has to try very hard not to wince. The bottle of oil is misplaced, too, recovered from the bottom cupboard around the side after mutual grumbling about putting things in proper places and Dorian, Cullen is sure, only refrains from making that dirty because Cullen kisses him quiet. 

Freshly-bared legs finally spread around Cullen’s hips, Dorian sits expectantly on the edge of the desk and maneuvers Cullen closer by the cock again with a roll of his eyes when Cullen moves too slow. Cullen goes, chuckling. “Somewhere to be?”

Dorian shoves the bottle into Cullen’s chest and pulls one of his legs up higher. “Why waste time? I’d say your little ‘swordplay’ gambit was enough flirting to go on.”

Cullen unstoppers the bottle, squinting at Dorian as he coats his fingers. “You’d count that as flirting?” he asks. Dorian’s moustache twitches. Cullen very much wants to kiss it, so he does. 

Dorian harrumphs when he pulls away, still grousing. “What you and I consider flirting are very different th-- _ ah _ !’ 

Cullen hums pleasantly as Dorian jerks in his arms, and slides the tips of his fingers back out from his body. 

“Brute,” Dorian says, voice shaky as Cullen circles his hole. Cullen grins. “You like it.”

He slips his fingers back inside, deeper this time, and Dorian gasps sharply and shivers, sagging on the exhale into a shivery pile of limbs as Cullen works his fingers in and out of his body, unhurried. Cullen can feel his own arousal building, the wetness slicking the hair of his thighs within his breeches while his flesh and blood cock pulses against the base of the glass. 

_ “I don’t want to presume, Commander,”  _ Josephine had begun, on a to-that-point nondescript day sometime after he and Dorian had become, more publically, a  _ them _ . She had then, naturally, gone on to presume. Cullen had blushed furiously once he’d put it together, blushed harder still at the promotional illustrations in the booklet she pressed into his hands, and stammered his way out of her study so fast he thought his heels might catch fire only to stammer his way back in three days later, unable to get the thought out of his head. 

To her immense credit, Josephine possessed in spades both professionalism and extremely good taste in the quality of material goods. Cullen will likely be thanking her for this until he last draws breath. 

He gives his wrist one last arcing twist, buried to the palm, and then draws his hand away. Dorian laments its loss immediately, looking halfway to debauched already as he reaches for Cullen. Cullen, unable as always to deny him, goes willingly. The tapered head of his cock slides into Dorian as easily as Cullen’s fingers had, and Dorian shudders and groans, long and indulgent, and pulls Cullen close. 

It doesn’t last long. Cullen works Dorian’s body expertly, palming him to a quick and violent release that spatters against Dorian’s chest and adds itself to the sweat pooling in the space between them while Cullen ruts him into the desk, grinding roughly against the textured base of his cock. He comes with a snarl, with Dorian’s nails digging furrows in his scalp, down his back, around the taut swell of his biceps. The kisses Dorian gives him between their labored breaths are slow, lazy and satisfied. 

“You really don’t have to worry about me, you know,” Dorian says after, while he gathers up his strewn clothes from Cullen’s floor. Cullen looks up, the cloth in his hand pausing mid-swipe in the cup of his hip. There’s the tone again-- the one that sounds far too casual. Easy to retract, should Cullen meet him with a different level of emotion. Cullen hates it, but it’s not about him. It never really has been. 

“I know,” is what he says, and finishes mopping himself up. Dorian’s back is mostly to him, and Cullen can see only the smallest slice of his face. Cullen watches him hold his tunic in his hands and worry the hem of it between his thumb and middle finger. 

“I expect,” Dorian continues, in a very small voice, “that I am still unused to being worried over.” 

Cullen feels his heart break, a little. He leaves the cloth behind and moves to Dorian, taking his hand. Dorian shakes his shirt in one hand with an air of bored nonchalance, still turned away. 

“Or of having someone to come back to?” Cullen prompts gently, hopefully. Dorian’s breath goes out of him in a quiet  _ whooshing  _ chuckle. “Yes, yes, that too,” he says, with a bit more of his usual bite. His eyes are shiny, but Cullen doesn’t dare comment. Instead, he tugs Dorian around with a little jerk of his hand, and when Cullen goes up on the balls of his feet to kiss him Dorian, obligingly, lowers to meet him in the middle. 

Too soon for Cullen’s likely, Dorian pulls away with an exaggerated grimace. “You smell,” he says, wrinkling his nose. Cullen raises an eyebrow. “You’re not exactly a basket of roses yourself, you know.” 

“Better anything than wet dog.” 

“It’s  _ musk _ !” Cullen insists, laughing. “And I’ve been told it’s quite alluring.” 

“Oh,” Dorian says, with simpering sweetness, “I’m very sorry, Amatus. They were lying.”

Cullen laughs again, and wrestles Dorian down. 


End file.
